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I have been playing and beaten Masseffect 3 and i was abit confused about the endings i did heard about.. how the fans were raging about. It is not that bad and well to be honest i have seen FAR worser endings than that. I was ok with the ending(s). Sure some of it didn't make sense and was rushed. and it is NOT the end on Mass effect universe. only on Sherpard. he/she dies unless in the red ending where he/she is moving in rubbles and dying. the writers need a swift kick in their groin for sure. some fans did make that Indoctrination theory about the endings which sounds like an overanalyzing to me. “But it is the only way it makes sense”- argument don't work on me.the endings would be worser with that theory in fact.i just believe it is REAL and it works because the techology behind the weapon used against reapers.. are so advanced that it looks like magic to us. it is not impossible in fact. try to think about that. people for 1000 years ago will be awed about our techology today and believe it to be magic. i guess it is the same in that ending. *shrugs* we will see what will happen next. Anyway it didn't ruin the masseffect universe for me and i rather liked the green ending.

what do you think? and terrible sorry about my english. not my first lang. :B

There's allot things wrong with the ending that can't be explained without spoiling the whole thing. So let me start…

Prior to the release of the game, representatives from Bioware mentioned how the ending of Mass Effect 3 would reflect on how you played the 3 games. You were supposed to feel accomplished; that your choices mattered. Casey Hudson, the executive producer for Mass Effect, specifically said this:“This story arc is coming to an end with this game. That means the endings can be a lot more different. At this point we're taking into account so many decisions that you've made as a player and reflecting a lot of that stuff. It's not even in any way like the traditional game endings, where you can say how many endings there are or whether you got ending A, B, or C.”People bought the game, believing in this statement. What they ended up getting was a game that was in any way like a traditional game ending, where your choices carry exceptionally little and you're standing in front of getting to pick option A, B, or C. To make matters worse, all endings are near identical, have a bitter sweet tune to it and is full of blatant plot holes.

Regardless of how you played the game, whether you only played Mass Effect 3 or were one of the many who played them all, none of your choices really did matter, when it came to how the game ended. The only thing that mattered to how “good” or “bad” the ending was by how much War assets you had. If you exported a character from the previous games, you'd get a small boost to those assets. How you played the games mattered very little. Did you save the council in ME1? That means that the Alliance fleet is slightly weaker at the beginning of ME3, but instead of you get Destiny Ascension to help out with the final fight. If you killed the council the Council flag ship is destroyed but the Alliance fleet is stronger for it. War Assets remain marginally the same. Did you destroy the Collector base in ME2 or did you give it to TIM(The Illusive Man)? Doesn't matter one way or another. You'd think that allowing TIM to own that base would have been a huge boost to Cerberus and depriving them it would have dealt a great blow. Regardless of what you did, they're no more or less prevalent in ME3. In both cases, they have access to indoctrination technology and a huge army of slave soldiers. The ONLY difference, is that when you're done attacking the Cerberus base, you get to retrieve a piece of the Reaper larva that you defeated in ME2; a reaper heart if you destroyed the base (worth 100 war assets) or a reaper brain if you gave TIM the base (worth 110 war assets). A difference of 10 bloomin' points.So regardless of how much of a renegade or a paragon you are, you can easily mount up the amount of War assets that you need to get the “best” ending, especially if you play a bit of multiplayer, in order to push up the galactic readiness level.

And what about that ending? No matter how poorly you did at collecting war assets, you can reach the end. The game divides your war assets into three pools; Fleet, Ground forces and Crucible. Your Fleet and Ground force score doesn't matter at all apart from the fact that if your Fleet score is low, you'll get a slightly more depressing fleet battle video, where the Reapers start tearing the ships apart or a video where the fleet is holding the line if your score is high. If your ground force score is low, then you can stand next to a group of soldiers that are gathered around a radio and overhear depressing radio chatter about how the ground forces are being decimated, otherwise, if your score is high enough you'll still get depressing news, except 50% of the forces managed to make it to the ground and that they're ready for the final push. Regardless of how high your ground force score is, the entire force gets killed in the final push.Then comes the Crucible score.If you have a low Crucible score AND you played a paragon, you can only chose to Control the reapers. Otherwise, if your played a renegade, you can only destroy the reapers. When your score is this low, your actions will destroy all life on Earth.If you have a medium Crucible score, you can pick both destroy and control. As you pick your choice, life on Earth is spared, BUT all remaining buildings on Earth are destroyed (yet somehow people are spared).If you have a high Crucible score, you can also pick the third option, synthesis, which is supposed to be the “best” option. Also, all 3 choices mean nothing extra bad happens to Earth; all humans and still standing buildings survive.This video shows you ALL the different endings. You can judge how different they feel.

Have you heard of the “Endor Holocaust” scenario? It started off as a theory proposed by Star Wars fans, regarding the fact that a giant moon sized super weapon was detonated in orbit of the planet Endor, at the end of “Return of the Jedi”. While the movie ended there, with the allusion “And everyone lived happily ever after”, some proposed that such an act would have catastrophic effects on the planet. Billions of tons of debris would start raining over the planet, some of it undoubtedly radioactive, and it would be equivalent of being frequently hit by massive meteorites. It would cause an extinction level event and wipe out the Evoks.

This theory has now become a trope of its own, and refers to when a story ends in such a way that the audience can come to the conclusion that the world is far worse of at the end of the story, even though the ending doesn't specifically state so. Many fans have pointed out that regardless of what choice you make, the Relay network is destroyed. Now that is gone, thousands of worlds that were dependent on it will suffer. What used to take hours or days worth of travel will now take decades or hundreds of years. There were tons of upstarter colonies around that had yet to reach self sufficient levels and will now starve and die off. Many worlds (like Noveria for example) specialized in producing and exporting products that they didn't need to other worlds.And what about Earth? Sure, it's been saved from the reapers but lets not forget that the largest multi-racial fleet in the history of the galaxy is parked outside it. None of these races will be able to return home now. Earth is devastated after the war and would have needed tons of relief effort to get it going again. Now it's been deprived of those supplies and there's a giant war fleet, full of starving aliens, in orbit of it.

THEN we have the people nitpicking at the fact that at the end of EVERY ending scenario, Joker is seen running off with your crew, INCLUDING those who were down on Earth with you. The only way that this is possible, is if Joke decided to land on Earth, pick up your teammates, then hightail it out of there, while humanity and its allies are still fighting the Reapers. That's the only way possible for him to have managed to outrun the explosion like that. That also happens to go against everything about that character and most of your crewmates. Shepard that I made would never have abandoned them nor would they have abandoned me.

And speaking about what Shepard would or would not have done. Everything about the way he or she behaved at the end felt off. This is one of the reasons why so many people are supporting the indoctrination theory. Most people who played this game either played a bull headed Shepard who would not take shit from anyone or a super paragon who could always find a better way, even if everyone told him/her that it was impossible. At the end of the game, we get introduced to this random master manipulator creature that's supposedly behind everything, throws out his ridiculous justification to why he created the Reapers and offers you 1 to 3 choices that you have to pick and there are not possible alternatives and you're just supposed to accept all this? You can't even ask him any questions after he'd done with his one sided monologue.

The funny thing is, I can continue talking about this ending; find more things wrong with it, but I notice how long this drivel has already become and that I desperately need to wrap this up.

Most of the people who have criticized the folks that hated the ending are accusing them of being crybabies that didn't get their bottle; that we're being upset at the fact that we didn't get a happy ending, where Shepard stands triumphant with the universe calling out his/her name in celebration, that the game doesn't end with him/her toasting a brewsky with Garrus as they're lounging around on beach chairs, with a downed Reaper in the background or that we didn't get to have our 3.4 blue babies with Liara. This argument has NOTHING to do with the ending not being happy. We're fine with Shepard sacrificing him/herself. If you don't get that, you're not getting what this whole thing is about.

I'm not angry about the way that the game ended. I'm disappointed.

Those were my two cents.If you have any other questions, please deposit a quarter.This space for rent.

thank you for your post and i like that you did put alot of effort to enlight me more about the whole thing. I am impressed. :)I guess I am too calm for my own good. heh.Now i can see why there is a big reaction on the ending(s) and fans understandable demands a DLC that will adjust that ending and tie up the loose ends. But i don't know if EA WILL do that like the company behind Fallout 3 did with their broken steel DLC. Is there any hold in that rumour about a DLC comming out in April.

I finished playing a while ago and yeah, it was pretty disapointing. But I don't get why people are saying that it “ruined the mass effect series”. Honestly, I'm in the bracket of players that thinks “I've seen worse”, I still don't understand what happened at the end of KotOR 2. Also, at least to me, the indoctrination theory is just fans trying to justify a bad ending.

That a DLC is on the way that will fix the ending, is mostly hearsay. There's allot going for it though, because we know for a fact that Bioware is working on making DLCs for the game. I doubt that we'll see another crewmember because in the past two games, the trend has been to include an unaccessible room aboard the ship that's reserved for the DLC crewmembers. In ME2, there were two rooms reserved for Zaeed and Kasumi but in ME3 there was only one room reserved for Javik. No more unaccessible rooms = no more DLC squatmates. I've heard that one of the DLCs is supposed to include a mission where you're going after a Collector ship that was out on a mission around the time when you did the suicide attack on their base but that is the only semi-confirmed details I've heard. Couple of days ago, Bioware did issue a press release saying that they did not have any plans to change the ending but due to the level of criticism that they've received, they are now considering it.

The people supporting the Indoctrination theory are convinced that Bioware is intentionally holding back any info about a “proper ending” DLC and that it will be announced in one or two months time.They believe that the indoctrination ending was introduced because the creators ran out of time to finish the proper ending. They're clinging to this because the only alternative is to accept such a badly written ending as the official thing.

I've studied the indoctrination theory and it's really well put together. It's so extensive that explaining it would create an even bigger wall of text then the one I made last time.Instead, I'm just going to post these two youtube videos.

How many times have you played the original Knights of the Old Republic?

How many times have you played Knights of the Old Republic II?

I for one have now finished a full run through KotOR three times; done Jedi twice (male and female) and once as a Sith (female). On top of that, I've played the final mission several times (an old favorite of mine is where I take my super squeaky clean “I can't believe how much of a boyscout he is” Jedi from my original playthrough and have him succumb to Bastila's temptation in the Temple).An old buddy of mine couldn't stop playing that game. He continuously started it again and again; for him it was like watching his favorite movie. He actively examined the mods community and experimented different playthroughs with various mods.

I've played KotOR II once. Last year I tried starting a new run, using the “Restoration project” mod but I gave up on playing it before I was halfway through. I have never heard that buddy of mine mention that game.

…

There are allot of people out there who have invested hundreds of hours on the Mass Effect franchise. Allot of those people have created several characters and made them follow different paths through the first two games. There's allot of emotional commitment behind spending so much time on something. These players genuinely cared for the story and wanted to see it through; see all the possible outcomes. Allot of those players now can't bare the thought of going through the game again with their other characters.

I suppose if I were to find a good example from the movie media, then I loved watching the original Matrix movie again, looking over the details that I missed in the first run. I've only seen the sequels once and I don't intend on watching them again.

…when you think about it, doesn't the Reaper creator kinda remind you of the Architect from the Matrix?

Those were my two cents.If you have any other questions, please deposit a quarter.This space for rent.

I can see your point, I definetly played KotOR more times than KotOR 2 and the matrix sequels really weren't very good. Even though I wasn't that down on Mass Effect 3 ending I don't think I'm in the mood for more playthrough's and definetly think it deserves a better ending.

Product Placement wrote:…when you think about it, doesn't the Reaper creator kinda remind you of the Architect from the Matrix?

Mine must have been buggy since I couldn't choose another ending… It was only synthasis and nothing else.It seemed like an ok ending to me, the music was a downer though.

Indoctrination is a stupid idea, simply because it's SOOOOooooo freaking obvious and signposted when it happens. Mass Effect is a great series but it is NOT that subtle.

As to the choices… well it's pretty much what I've come to expect in the game. Obviously it's every game designers dream to have a choose your own adventure thing that has a real story tree and isn't completely linear, but time and budget almost always screws that idea. And then you add to that new gamers dropping in late from the second or third game. There are some ham-fisted ways to compensate, like that comic thing, but they don't work that well.So yeah, the choices in Mass Effect seemed to make a lot of difference superficially, but most of them were just that- mostly superficial, because if they really made a MAJOR plot change then the whole structure of the game would have to split… but it never does, the only central story is always Shepard, the other stuff is just decoration.-I'm not saying it should be that way, I'm just saying that's the way it's always really been in ME.

I would've liked better music at the end though! Oh, and your point about Joker with the crew-members on the ship being a plot hole… It's not. This is Mass Effect, a game were a “war strategist” standing in the middle of a hall on a space station bemoans the fact that Krogan would be more effective if they could ride into battle on the backs of monsters that have been completely extinct for a few thousand years. So on your planet searching adventures you find an ancient fossilised skull of one of the creatures, you bring it back to the station where the guy is still standing in the same place, you tell him you've got a skull and where to pick it up from you, he thanks you, you talk to him a second later and he's already telling his contact that Krogan are riding into battle on these things.

So when did he go and get it from the Normandy? Is cloning instantaneous? So it takes shorter to clone something than it does to make a husk??? How about rearing a viable batch of the beasts for war? Re-introducing the Krogan to them? The training they'd have to do? Even in the magical future it would all take at the very hyperbolic least about a year for all that to happen, but it takes 2 seconds.And that's just one example. We accept this sort of thing because that's how things work in this game. You just let it pass or assume some time has magically passed somewhere. So for stuff like the crew on the ship, I let it pass.

Despite the illusions ME has always been an interactive movie on rails. But a very entertaining one.

I remember the silliness that was the fossilized skull and the insta-cloned war beasts. It happened to me as well and caused me to smirk and roll my eyes. However, that particular point and in fact all of the side mission results are a really minor design errors at best. Instead of designing it so that the mission result dialog wasn't available for you until after you left the area and returned, they had it available for you to listen to immediately. It's the same as when you return to that Salarian much later and he's still there making the exact same phone call, every time you try talking to him again, because they didn't include any additional dialog, nor did they design the encounter so that it would disappear once you were done with it. It's the same as when you ask someone the same question and they burst into the same lengthy speech they just gave you, word-for-word, because the designers wanted to make certain you wouldn't miss a critical plot point that was said and didn't think about including transcripts that you could read through afterwards. It's all game mechanic related stuff that has very little to do with the writing.

However, I find it odd that you would say that such an alarmingly big continuity bug that occurs during the endgame cinematics is not a plot hole, by pointing out another continuity bug elsewhere in the game, that's purely based on faulty game mechanics.

It's most definitely a plot hole. The writers created the scenario where, at one point, the Normandy is in a middle of a battle, in orbit of Earth, while your entire team is on ground, making the final push against that teleporting beam, and then it's desperately trying to outrun a galaxy spanning explosion, with your entire crew aboard. Allot of people are not only finding it hard to accept the logistics behind him somehow managing to ditch the battle, land on Earth, collect all your team and then hightail it out of the system before the station blows up and destroys the Solar relay, but there's also the fact that it's just so much against his character to be doing something like that. Especially if you were playing a paragon type character, he and your team would never have abandoned you like that.

But at any rate, it doesn't really matter. This how the game ended. I'm interested in seeing how the extra content DLC will come out, but I'm not holding my breath that it will be anything spectacular.

Those were my two cents.If you have any other questions, please deposit a quarter.This space for rent.

It's nothing to do with a game mechanic problem and everything to do with the issue with the Normandy at the end of the game.JUST like with the Normandy, it involves logic errors. That clone army thing, and all the similar examples of the same sorts of things happening in ALL three games constantly, are things that would take multiple steps, in order to happen, a lot of time and many other dependant factors that just are not evident, but for some reason it's ok to make allowances for that faulty story logic every single time, till the end of the game?

My point is that all those so called logic and story issues at the end of the game with the Normandy don't really matter. It's just the fact that the ending was evidently cheap and rather weak that makes people focus on these other factors.

For my own play through, the ending was reasonably satisfying, but there wasn't much to it and it wasn't very strong or especially clever.

I've seen all the different ending versions and seen that all that do is a colour change with some slightly different animations. It's blatantly obvious that for some reason the game got a budget ending. Someone decided they didn't have the time or money to complete the game so they made the best of it. It's pretty sad and gives no incentives to multiple play-throughs.

So there you go. As a single playthrough ending, it's passable. As a multichoice, part of the whole game thing, it's cheap.

If anything the ending of ME3 is an abject lesson on just exactly why budget minded project-manager types with limited creativity should have a much smaller place in creative projects:

1. This isn't a situation where “you can't please everyone” because it's a multichoice game which by its very definition and DNA means that it is SUPPOSED to please most people. If it doesn't that is a massive failure.

2. The reputation of the franchise is built almost entirely on player experience, satisfaction, and the game choice mechanic. NOT the brand name. If you fail on those points you ruin the games reputation, making the property less popular and worth less the gaming market. Reputation is everything here.

For a few extra thousand dollars saved and less time spent on making the game by limiting the work on the endings, they've probably COST themselves a few hundred thousand in publicity for the game, their company brand and in future sales.

All in all this should be a very good lesson the penny pinchers about their place in the creative world.

It's hard to say how long the Mass Effect 3 timeline is supposed to be, what with the game lacking any sort of a time management system, but it's safe to assume that it's at very least several weeks, if not couple of months. Constructing the Crucible couldn't possibly take shorter time than that. We also know that space travel between systems can take several hours. The game designers were faced with the rather large challenge of conveying the span of time, while at the same time obeying the rules of an RPG, where you could revisit locations ad nauseam.

The side missions were undoubtedly written like this:-Mission starts when Shepard talks with character X.-When Shepard finds item Y, he can go back to character X and complete mission.-After completing the mission, Shepard can talk to character X to hear the result of mission.

Regarding the Salarian scientist example, it would have made more sense to force you to leave the area and come back later to hear the mission results. But at the same time, it wouldn't have made that much sense to enforce the same restrictions on, let's say, the Asari commando, who was looking for new Biotic Amps; her post mission speech is to call her superior to let her know that she's found a model that would meet the required specifications.

Trust me when I say, this is a game mechanic problem. This is what I'm studying. It's a bloody difficult trick to impose a sense of urgency or any sort of time progression in a free roaming environment. The best tool that Bioware had to work with were to utilize triggerable events, like the attack on the Citadel, which changed stuff inside the place. In essence, this was the same tool that they tried using in Fable, where you could see some sort of time progression in the towns changing, as you finished certain missions.

The writing during the endgame cinematic were not restricted to these same limitations, so the “Joker and your crew is no longer in our solar system” plot hole is purely based on faulty writing.

The ending does feel terribly ham fisted. Like it was put together at the last minute. It didn't do the game any justice, and like you said, it damages the replay value of the entire series. There are allot of players out there who played through the first two games, several times, with different types of characters who did different types of choices, because they were hoping it would have some meaningful impact on the ending. These are the most disappointed people of them all.

The upcoming “new content” DLC is supposed to enrich the ending with more content that supposedly reflects your actions throughout the game. I'm not quite sure how they intend to pull that off, but it's possible that we get to see more space battle clips, like seeing Quarian ships in actions, if you managed to bring in the Quarian fleet, or we might get to see Jack leading her team into battle, if you had her fighting on the front line, etc. The endings will otherwise stay the same.

Those were my two cents.If you have any other questions, please deposit a quarter.This space for rent.

I have to say again PP that it's not a mechanic problem here with the fossil guy in that the narrative STILL wouldn't make any sense even if that side mission happened at the very beginning of the game and the result didn't come through till the end.It's WORSE writing than the so-called plotholes in the end. All the processes and resuts described and implied would have taken years. Thinking about them happening in ONE year is super-dooper scifi magic thinking. Thinking about that happening in “weeks” is “forggedaboutit” territory.

So to are things like the Quarians and the Geth coming together to support each other and then helping on the crucible all so amazingly quickly. 300 years of hate quashed like nothing in seconds. Getting the Krogans rallied for war, convinced and transported to Palvain… WTF? Didn't have have 2 games already specifically outlining their neverendong abhorrance and disdain for Salarians and Turians? Then they're all coming to Earth all within no time at all… with the genophage already history. The Rachni perfectly well integrated into the crucible project…? They rallied all those scattered workers quickly and worked out all the mechanics for them to get there and working with other species who HATE and FEAR them beyond measure…

This is scfi game logic and precedent within the game that is being trampled continually in order to make the hasty race-to-the-end plot work. And we let it. Mainly because we want to get to the end so badly that we don't really care that the story is so badly written and threadbare. That the end is a much the same as the rest of Me3 shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

Even for all that I still enjoyed it. But Me2 is a better game. Mainly because the world is bigger there. In this one you're shrunk to the Citadel and Normandy and in the end they even take that away from you.

Yeah, all right, I'll give you that. It makes incredibly little sense that they can have these creatures ready for distribution on a galactic scale in matter of weeks. It does operate on the suspension of belief that the Salarians are super advanced geneticists, with a ready access to large scale cloning vats and such. They're supposed to be so good at what they do, that they can make a fully grown clown in matter of days, if not hours. Even still, that's allot of handwaving.

I remember, during one of my many trips to the bridge, hearing EDI talk about the logistics required to transport the Krogans around, lampshading the exact problem you just brought up, seen here. As for the “how on earth these guys can be working together” thing, it's operating on the concept that enemies can at very least put aside their differences for a brief time, while facing a much larger, common threat. Allot of people, especially the Salarians, bring up concerns about what kind of problem the Krogans will be, after the war. It's practically given that the Salarians will instigate another conflict with the Krogans, once the Reaper threat is over.

There's allot of moments in the game where people stop for a moment to scratch their heads about how all of this is possible. They throw out sentences like how they're amazed that the Crucible is being constructed at such a ludicrously fast pace and how they're awestruck about old foes working together. There's allot of readable material to be discovered about the behind the scenes stuff that voices all kinds of concerns. One commander talks about how the original arrival of the Rachni at the construction site almost caused a confrontation, due to the news that they were arriving to help hadn't passed down the entire line of command. A classified terminal at the Specter requisition office talks about an estimate that the entire galactic economy would soon be bankrupt, based on the amount of cost and resources being poured into the war effort.

All of this is operating on a huge stretch of belief and the writers do try their hardest to impose as much realism to the situation as they can. Anyone who's paying attention to these bits of info will get the sense of urgency, which again is crushed by all these stupid side missions, like finding a stupid prayer book so that the Volus can feel more generous and donate to the war effort.

Those were my two cents.If you have any other questions, please deposit a quarter.This space for rent.